Days 28-31 "A trip to the hospital and Easter"

Well, I had a eventful weekend, more or less. On Friday morning I woke up completely sick, I couldn't hear out of my left ear, had a headache, was nauseous, got very little sleep and generally felt like I had a huge sinuous infection. So I went to St. Mary's Hospital (the biggest in the city) where they have English speaking staff. Turns out I was wrong, I had a sinuous AND ear infection. Yeah... so they loaded me up with antibiotics and set me on my way. Thus I slept throughout a good part of Friday and Saturday. Sunday I was feeling well enough to attempt to find the only English speaking church I've heard about so far in the city. So I hopped a cab and went to the gates of Camp Red Cloud, one of the many U.S. bases and sure enough, the church was just across the street, and thus I was able to enjoy a lovely Easter service. Afterwards, the pastor, his family and a few others convinced me to go eat on base with them. We ended up eating at the Commanding General's mess, which was very much like a supper club (well, at least I think so, I've never really been to a supper club before). But the food was good and afterwards I caught the train back to my side of town and spent the rest of the day vegetating.

As for today (Monday) I have successfully made the call and faxed the info to get internet. DSL, here I come!!!! With any luck I'll have it hooked up by Friday, maybe even Thursday.... should also have a bank account tomorrow. I'm still deciding if I want to get a cell phone, the rates they charge foreigners are bad I here, but I'll decide on that after I get paid. I also heard some good news on the martial arts front, as a school willing to teach me Kumdo (the Korean version of Kendo) has been found. That also will be something I start after my first payday.

I'd also like to take a moment to say "hi" to my home church of Lewis Lake back in the States. Hope you all are well.

Anyhow, on to the pictures. The first few will be pictures of my apartment. The rest will be pictures and the video I promised from Seoul. Enjoy!
Note: it seems the video will take some time, maybe later

Day 23 or "What to do with crazed kindergartners"

Hypothetical situation: You have 11 kids who speak next to no English. Next, they have the attention span of a kid with ADHD and no Ritalin. Then for good measure, just pretend they don't want to listen. Yeah that's how my morning was....

On another note I'm officially a registered alien! That's right! I even have a card to prove it!! Now I am entitled to have a bank acct, medical insurance, a cell phone, the internet, and the list goes on. Hopefully sometime in the next week I'll actually set out to get all that mess taken care of.

In other news, two teachers are scheduled to leave at the end of the month, which in turn means we are scheduled to get two new teachers sometime around Saturday if my calculations are correct. That also means I and the other 3 three teachers who arrived at the same time will no longer be the low people on the ladder!

As for my weekend, I took another trip into Seoul, this time to the districts of Itaewon and Dongdaemon (pronounced Eat-a-won and Dong-day-moon). Itaewon is considered the area where all the foreigners go, consequently, many of the shops and restaurants have English all over the place. Among the restaurants I spotted were Subway, Outback Steakhouse, the Hard Rock Cafe, Quiznos, KFC, Burger King, and Mc Donalds to name a few. While Subway tempted me, I ended up going to Kraze Burger, which is really sort of a gourmet diner. I ended up getting a burger and it was soo big you had to eat it with a knife and fork, I give Kraze burger four and a half fries out of five (mainly because they had sweet pickles, what a travesty). I also visited and English book store with a slightly suggestive title, so I don't think I'll be posting that, but at an rate I couldn't find anything worth getting, which is unfortunate. As for Dongdaemon, it's reall attractions are the stadium (really 2 stadiums next to each other, one for baseball, one for soccer) and 5 malls devoted all to clothing. Clothing is a whole other issue, I'll take some picture of various styles of dress here in a bit, but a lot of it sometimes bewilders me.

On the subject of pictures, I will be uploading some more just as soon as I get the internet in my apartment. Cheers!

Day 16....

Well, it's Tuesday afternoon for me (for my readers in the Central Time Zone it's now 11 PM), or more precisely 1 PM. So I survived moving my stuff to my new apartment on Sunday and it is much nicer than my old apartment. My new bedroom is around the same size my last apartment was.... yeah. I'll post pics at a later date.

In other news, I went to Seoul on Saturday. I took the "subway" (it's really a cross between a subway and elevated train in that in actual Seoul proper it's a subway but on the outskirts and here in Uijeongbu it's just an elevated train). It was about a 40 min ride, but the real crazy part is how much it costs. One way it cost a total of 1300 won, or about $1.30. Furthermore, they have this thing called a T-money card. Think of it as a rechargeable gift card that lets you avoid buying tickets for the "subway" or paying cash/change to ride the bus. VERY HANDY. The trip to Seoul had no real set purpose or destination other than I wanted to get a watch to replace the one I brought, since it broke on me.... I managed to find a very nice replacement for 10000 won ($10) from a street vendor. However the most amazing thing I saw that day was a traffic conductor. He was dressed like a 1930's gangster or something. He wore a long gray trench coat with black fur lining the collar and a gray and black fedora. They way he directed traffic was more like a weird hand dance or something. We (I was with another teacher who arrived the same time as I did by the name of Mike) shot a video of it on Mike's camera, I'll try to upload that too.

Yesterday I decided to broaden my horizons and go to a Korean bathhouse, again with Mike. It was crazy, but in a good way. The actual bath area had 4 communal tubs (3 with varying temps of hot water and a near freezing plunge pool) , showers lining the wall, two rows of taps to wash yourself at (you don't do it in the pool) and 3 saunas (ranging from VERY HOT to surface of the Sun). Also in the bath house is a barber, a restaurant, a bar, a gym and a row of massage chairs and machine for you feet, where for a mere 100 won ($1) you may get 10 mins of massage. Entrance itself was only 6000 won ($6). Yeah, really awesome in my opinion, but sorry there won't be any pictures from the bathhouse. (I know some of you will be let down by that).

Day 9...... The day before kindergarten....

Today, I figured I would be a go getter and go in early and get some planning done and some materials together, but that was a real bad idea. First, It started snowing pretty hard, which meant I had to ride the bus to avoid ending up drenched. Next, I had to get materials and the like organized for my kindergarten class, then I had 4 elementary classes to teach, and not all of them had there books or materials either...... yeah.

On another note Saturday I had beef shabu-shabu style (which basically) means it's cooked in at your table by dipping it into boiling broth. Monday night I went out for Chinese and had what seemed to be some sort of sweet and sour chicken. I haven't ate much today except for a chocolate coronet....

Oh and the picture of the town was taken on foot as walked to school one day.

One week down.... AND PICTURES

Ok. So, as promised here are some pictures from my first week. Most should be pretty self explanatory. The first is a picture of the scenery on my way to work. Since I'm on the outskirts right now, my scenery changes quite a bit, but I wanted something to prove my description of Korea a post or two back. The next three pictures are from the kindergarten graduation on Friday. The kids in costumes weren't graduating so they did a little presentation. The last picture is a little hard to read, but I find amusing as it's a decent example of Konglish. Konglish is sort of like Spanglish, Engrish and the sort. You actually see all kinds of poorly phrased signs, this is just one example.

EDIT: For those who can't make out the picture, it reads: "Our slogan is 'Break the impossibility habit.'"